MGT5PLS: Analysis of Project Leadership at Tesla and Space X

This presentation provides a group analysis of the project leadership challenges faced by Tesla and Space X, both founded by Elon Musk. It highlights the competitive pressures of globalization and the importance of the knowledge economy for leaders. For Tesla, challenges included limited adoption of electric cars, performance limitations, and the need for charging station investments. Space X faced challenges like securing NASA contracts, attracting commercial customers, and managing financial risks associated with public projects and vertical integration. The analysis emphasizes the high-stakes decision-making required in these innovative ventures and the responsibilities borne by leaders in such pressurized environments. Desklib offers similar solved assignments and past papers for students.

Running Head: PROJECT LEADERSHIP
Project leadership
September 17
2018

PROJECT LEADERSHIP 1
Table of Contents
Challenges for leaders................................................................................................................2
Challenges at Tesla Electric Car................................................................................................2
Challenges at Space X................................................................................................................3
References..................................................................................................................................4

PROJECT LEADERSHIP 2
Challenges for leaders
Globalization has increased the competition to such a very extent that it is almost impossible
to come back even if we want to. In such a competitive world being a leader is in itself a
challenge. Today the knowledge economy has come to such a sharp focus that it has come to
the point above anything else. Today leaders are supposed to defeat the competition and take
their organization to the top at least within the industry (Nodine, & Johnstone, 2015).
Working on any project will introduce challenges to leaders working on it. Leaders’ job is to
take decision to direct the organization growth. Leaders are responsible for the project’s
success as well as failure. Their task is to analyse every possible factor to complete the
project successfully. In this journey from starting a project to the successful completion is
very challenging varying from project to project. In case of projects like Space-X and Tesla
Electric Car these challenges are very tough for leaders especially. Such huge projects
associate with high level of multiple risks that leaders have to face during the whole time
period of the project life (Kabisch, 2015). Elon Musk founder of tesla companies introduced
both the projects with so much expectation that leaders working on these projects have to be
very precise and make decisions with strong statistical evidences in the support of their
decisions.
For leader working on such projects different external and internal challenges can be faced by
leaders. In situation like working on such a big project always comes with so many
responsibilities for the company. This ability of people working under such pressurised
situations makes them different from other.

PROJECT LEADERSHIP 3
Challenges at Tesla Electric Car
Manufacturing an electric car was an idea to take the automobile world into the direction of
using renewable energy to introduce an alternative to the industry (Nykvist, & Nilsson,
2015). This was really a big step towards the use of renewable energy and saving the earth’s
environment. Working on this project leaders of the company had to face the following
challenges:
 Less adoption of electric cars as transportation alternative
 Limited performance of electric vehicles
 Limited customer market window for the business
 Leaders have to decide for an essential investment for the charging stations
installation at right (Anderson, 2018).
Challenges at Space X
This project called Space-X was introduced to provide an affordable and reusable
transportation to the space. Main objective of this project was to increase the space mobility
with the help of an affordable space shuttle (Dvorsky, 2018). In this project leaders faced so
many challenges like:
 Getting enough business from space travelling agencies like NASA
 Betting on the risk of being heavily dependent on NASA contracts and their
sustainability of business with the agency.
 Getting other commercial customers for the consumption of their services or products
 Taking a decision to make the project public which was highly dependent on highly
predicted revenue stream.
 Company was baking on combination of increased demand and cost avoidance to
under-price competitors.

PROJECT LEADERSHIP 4
 Company was relying on vertical integration – pulling parts and component
production in-house.

PROJECT LEADERSHIP 5
References
Anderson, C. (2018). Tesla sued over claims it ran man’s dream car project off the road
[online]. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/02/tesla-new-
zealand-sued-claims-rebuilt-car-not-supported
Dvorsky, G. (2018). SpaceX’s Ambitious Internet Satellite Project Is Set to Launch This
Weekend, [online]. Retrieved from: https://gizmodo.com/spacex-s-ambitious-internet-
satellite-project-is-set-to-1823004481
Kabisch, N. (2015). Ecosystem service implementation and governance challenges in urban
green space planning—The case of Berlin, Germany. Land Use Policy, 42, pp. 557-
567.
Nodine, T., & Johnstone, S. M. (2015). Competency-based education: Leadership
challenges. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 47(4), pp. 61-66.
Nykvist, B., & Nilsson, M. (2015). The EV paradox–a multilevel study of why Stockholm is
not a leader in electric vehicles. Environmental Innovation and Societal
Transitions, 14, pp. 26-44.